What’s going on here is not unification but subjugation.
Heiner Müller, Der Spiegel (30/07/1990)
Oh, it’s all so long ago, isn’t it? When the wall came down I was 12 years old and crazy about belongings and about the world. I was embarrassed about coming from the GDR. I was embarrassed about going into shops in West Germany and being a grey and dark-blue complex of drab timidity amidst all the colours. With my first western money I bought myself a neon-coloured rucksack and a cassette recorder. I was already more colourful when I travelled with my mother in a packed train to Oberhausen in West Germany to see the acquaintances who had for years been sending us parcels for feast days and birthdays. I ate yoghurt for the first time, and liked it, and I draped myself in colours. Autumn colours were chic at the time: purple, ochre, etc.
Maybe I’d just lost interest in politics. If only I knew. At any rate Ernst Thälmann (the leader of the Communist Party who was later shot in Buchenwald) had recently been my hero, I’d wanted to be like him, and I’d thought about how he had managed to fashion a little inkwell with the bread that a prison warder had given him, fill it with milk and thus have a source of invisible ink that he could eat straight away if he had to. I wondered about that, and a moment later I wondered what it would be like to live with Martin Lee Gore (of synth-pop band Depeche Mode). I papered my room with posters of him, I dreamt about him, I was, even though I wasn’t quite a grown-up, Martin Lee Gore’s wife.
You probably didn’t know that before, but now you do. What I didn’t know for a long time: I was a torment to my parents, because capitalism now gripped me as firmly by the hand as the Pioneer Organisation had done before. As soon as it was there I was its willing talking doll, its passionate advocate, and I was right at the front of the queue of people buying and coveting consumer goods. I appropriated externals as if nothing else existed, and spent all my time observing who had what, and who had more, and established without much difficulty that we had less. To be precise, that was how things had seemed to me even before the wall came down, but now the differences were getting bigger. I couldn’t see what was being lost. I’ve only come to see it recently. I could see only what I didn’t have, and I was busy making demands and seeing those demands become reality. I never made any political demands, so for example I never complained in a public place about the new and much more visible distribution of money and opportunities; instead all my demands were made on my parents.
So I think I spent the years of growth after the fall of the GDR shopping. I barely knew how to do anything else but seek out those swiftly erected tent constructions full of cardboard boxes that contained all kinds of wonderful and desirable-looking cheap clothes, and later the new branches of large chains, afternoon after afternoon, and looking, wanting, buying. In retrospect I hold my hand up in front of my nose, because it smells of smoke. I remember that the nearby block where the Vietnamese guest-workers lived was said to be on fire. It’s clear in my memory that the fire had been started deliberately. I see people running, I see the excitement, I sense it, but perhaps it wasn’t even on fire, I’m not sure. But I remember very clearly that something was on fire somewhere for a while.
Heike Geissler, The Guardian (03/11/2019)
The opening of the Berlin wall on December 9th, 1989 – the east german authorities declared visits to west germany permissible, after weeks of social unrest – marked the symbolic and effective end of the “socialist block” of eastern europe and finally of the soviet union.
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In praise of insurrection
Je me révolte donc nous sommes.
Albert Camus, L’homme revolté
From the outside it may seem unimportant, but being there, and not giving up your own discourse, is vital. And I have been able to verify it personally. From the smallest to the largest, at any time you can delve into a conflict, radicalise a situation, show efficacy or experience. Your behavior speaks more about your political and social proposal than any discourse. When a group of protesters sit down and begin to sing the “som gent de pau” again, it is important that a discordant presence remind them that sitting invites the police to charge them and it leaves an area of the body as sensitive as the head exposed. When the chauvinistic and machista chants break through, it is necessary to break this dynamic and introduce anti-capitalist or libertarian slogans that serve as a counterweight. When a group of young people run shirtless and face-to-face fleeing from the sirens, it is difficult for them not to forget the anarchist militant who gave them an on-site tutorial on how to completely cover their face and head with the shirts that hung from their waists. When the spirits are inflamed after singing Els segadors, it is worth remembering to those around you that the lyrics of that hymn were composed by an old anarchist named Emili Guayavents (1899) and that is where the “com fem caure espigues d’or/quam convé seguem cadenes” comes from, … When a fascist ambushes to burst a demonstration, it can mean a change of perspective among those present that an anarchist is the first to detect the play and expel the “agent provocateur.” All this, although it hardly means anything more than a tiny drop in the current, is important to feed the channel and push it out of the calm waters.
I repeat: we are not facing a revolution, nor are we facing a perfect struggle. None is, none will be. The doomsayers who in each revolt or social mobilisation denounce that “it will not last”, that “it will fail” or that “it is not an integral revolution”, they are always and will always be right. They are now with regard to the riots in Catalonia, they were recently in relation to 15-M, they were a long time ago when they talked about May 68, but they also would have if they had been alive on July 19, 1936 and had been able to walk the streets of Barcelona. All revolutions and revolutions of revolutions that have occurred, throughout the history of humankind, have either failed or have been betrayed, and many of them have been partial enough for the term revolution to remain, perhaps, too gradiose. The doomsayers are not right because they are “clairvoyant geniuses”, they are right because their analytical horizon has, in reality, the same complexity as that of reminding us that we are all going to die. The question is whether, knowing the obvious, the high percentage of failure, demobilisation and repression that awaits us, it is worth moving, to intensify the situation, to gain influence, experience and number for the future, to take events to their limits, to struggle without idealizations or vague hopes or, on the contrary, to remain arms crossed, criticising from the distance, and waiting for death to arrive. As Simone Weil said: “I don’t like war, but in war I always thought that the most horrible thing was the situation of those who remained in the rear”.
When I returned from Barcelona, a comrade from the Tenants’ Union [Sindicato de Inquilinas de Gran Canaria] asked me: “In the end, those in the streets, who are they? Are they independentists or are they anti-system? And I had to answer what I saw: they are people, simply people, a people who are beginning to lose their fear. That is the truth.
Ruymán Rodríguez (Federación Anarquista de Gran Canaria): an excerpt from a longer reflection on the recent “independentist” protests in catalonia, published with A las barricadas (02/11/2019).
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We share below a short essay by Diego Conno, published with lobo suelto (27/10/2019), even though we might disagree with some of the text’s terminology (e.g., “popular”, “the people”, “moblisation”) – though even here, the words intimate new possible meanings – and we would dispute the need for “leadership” in riots and uprisings. And we do so, because it reflects a light on our times which may very well be our immediate future, that is, multiplying insurrections which are internally plural (they possess no centre, make no fixed demands, and are leaderless) and thus defying any single ideological and/or organisational form. And it is into this reality that any radical politics must plunge into.
But then perhaps this was always the case, and if we have lost sight of it, it is because we – I include anarchists here – have been blinded by the bolshevik myth. What unity (and what precisely this concept implies or should imply must be debated) insurrections come to possess is forged in the insurrection itself. A possible radical political movement cannot be judged from its inception (on the grounds of its purported goals); it must be made, and was made, in movement.
None of the riots, rebellions or insurrections of our time are nominally anarchist; they may in fact have very little to do with ideologically defined anarchism and/or anarchist movements (as was, is and will be in most cases). If this is then cited to justify passivity or indifference to the movement-event, anarchists condemn themselves to political irrelevance. This is not to argue that “we” must throw ourselves into every riot that comes along. Yet it is rarely possible to know beforehand how things will turn. And if what we face is violent death – and this is our fate within capitalism – then how can we not rebel?
There has never been a planned revolution; revolutions occur in the heat and passion of events. Thus what we can strive for is permanent revolution.
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